The American media totally failed when reporting on the end of the war in Afghanistan and the resulting evacuation of military and civilians from that country. Maybe that’s why President Biden is shouting in his announcement speech on the end of the war. I’d be shouting at the media too.
The US Media, especially TV media, has been shameful in its treatment of the end of this war, something we should be celebrating, not wringing our hands over. The Intelligencer almost gets it right, but this was written too soon to consolidate all that happened:
My media criticism was brought on by reading, finally, a critical article on two pro-war movies that were released about 10 years ago. These movies were very popular and even critically acclaimed: The Hurt Locker, and Zero Dark Thirty. In fact, I knew these two movies were pro-war propaganda, and decided not to see either one of them for that reason. I still haven’t seen them, and I don’t see any point to it. I’ve hated these wars over the last 20 years. I hated the wars, and I hated what they did to this country’s reputation. I hated the wasted money and I hated the way they made otherwise normal people worship the military and accept killing and torture. I hated the way anti-Muslim sentiment translated into TV shows and movies, to the point where Americans shrugged when they heard about torture and thought it was fair game for entertainment (in fact, did this usher in the ‘entertaining’ presidency of Donald Trump? Are we all just bored narcissistic sadists?)
Remember Abu Ghraib? I remember it. Ask GW Bush about it. A reminder of our national shame:
That’s what these movies represent to me. Sick, inhumane, immoral, unethical support for sadism and torture and killing, in both Afghanistan and in Iraq. That’s what occupying Afghanistan represented to me. What I needed to see came finally from MSNBC:
But my instinct is to believe that the lessons from the 9/11 era were, for many policy elites especially, rather shallow. Iraq is still discussed primarily as a strategic blunder rather than a moral one; the withdrawal from Afghanistan was met with fierce criticism from the mainstream media and the national security establishment. Despite an abundance of evidence that torture doesn’t work, maybe half the country believes it does.
So when the media went ape-shit hysteria-driven critical on President Biden when he finally ended the Afghanistan war, I turned it all off. I haven’t gone back to CNN (trash) or the New York Times (bad on war for 20 years) and maybe I never will. I hated how the western media portrayed that war as something so good, so necessary, we had to stay there and protect those girls in schools forever. Give me a fucking break. That is not why we were there. We were there to make contractors rich and protect the war profiteers, many of whom own large media companies. Also, the minerals that Afghanistan happens to be sitting on.
I’m over it. The war is over and we should celebrate. It was immoral and dishonest and a massive lie. People who want America to be at war forever should be banned from this country, driven out by force and sent to hell. It was never about protecting women. The women in America don’t enjoy equal rights, equal salaries, and are considered less than human in many of our “red” states to this day. (TEXAS!) Fix how the women in America are treated first, then worry about the women in the Middle East!
My trust in American media is completely gone. I will never fully believe what they are publishing again. They lie as much as Donald Trump, and with about as many pangs of conscience.
By the way, the best war movie I’ve ever seen was The Thin Red Line (1998). It’s not pro-war, and in fact it presents war as unnatural and immoral and horrifying, which is closer to how I feel about it. War is evil, not good, and it’s sure as hell not a valid source of employment or entertainment.
